


The Lovers Are Losing

by Lapsang



Series: Spiralling [2]
Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Earth, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Companion Piece, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, M/M, Slow Burn, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:27:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27492661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsang/pseuds/Lapsang
Summary: Arnold Rimmer thinks his housemate, Dave Lister, is absolutely, utterly, indisputably a goit. Especially because he's given him all these awful, messy,complicatedFeelings (to rhyme with 'Hell') to deal with.Rimmer POV companion fic to 'The Sovereign Light Cafe', my Modern day AU based off the song of the same name by Keane.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Series: Spiralling [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2009116
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	The Lovers Are Losing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Triquetra123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triquetra123/gifts).



> Alright, alright, it's here! The Rimmer bits!  
> Named after another Keane song because you're damned wrong if you think I'm gonna stop gleefully applying musical meaning to everything. The song's a little less story-fuelling but the themes still seemed very Rimmer-relevant...  
> To be updated trailing The Sovereign Light Cafe, because that is very much the main beast and I'm not spoiling anything here. ;)
> 
> With thanks to Triquetra123 for nudging me to write this. I hope you enjoy! :)

David Lister is absolutely, utterly, indisputably a goit. A git. A stupid smegheaded bastard, and a total, total one, at that.

From the minute he’d turned up on his doorstep, dripping wet, insubordinate from the off (wanting to see ID from a sodden stranger turning up at a strange hour was a perfectly reasonable request!), Rimmer had known he was trouble.

That stupid grin, that rascally accent, the way he made everything so much harder by worming his way into nearly every inch of Rimmer’s life and refusing to leave.

Yep, he was trouble, with a capital Truh.

Rimmer wasn’t sure how it happened. Didn’t even realise that it had happened for far too long. But it had. It had.

The penny finally dropped as he was watching Lister literally drop pennies into the coin pushers at the Palace Arcade. 

At first he’d thought it was brain freeze brought on by the unwise consumption of Mr Whippies in November. Then, as he watched Lister cheer on his final coin as it rolled down the track, wobbled along the edge of the pusher and then plopped into the perfect place to set off a huge cascade of coins - Rimmer found himself cheering along with him, hit with a heady rush of joy that didn’t make sense.

Lister had scooped the pennies out of the machine and pooled them in the front of his shirt, grinning.

“Think this is enough to buy a house? Maybe two?” 

“Come now, Listy, with that kind of fortune you might be able to get a helicopter, too.” 

Lister shook his shirt so the coins bounced up and down, a pleasant jingling sound. Some brightly coloured plastic bauble sifted it’s way to the top and Lister adjusted his grip to keep the shirt-bucket held in one hand so he could inspect the trinket.

It was a shiny green ring pop, wrapped in crackly cellophane. In the fluorescent lights of the arcade, it almost seemed to shine with its own light.

Lister bowed as deeply as he was able to with his treasure hoard bundled at his front, and presented the ring to Rimmer.

“Captain Emerald, a jewel to match your eyes,” He said, voice deepened playfully.

Rimmer took it in slightly shaking fingers, snapping back, “My eyes aren’t even green, you twerp,” but he quite forgot to put any bite in the retort.

“Matched in loveliness, if not in colour,” Lister shot back, winking, in his normal chirpy tone.

‘Smeg,’ Rimmer thought, looking at the ring. 

He’d been in a kind of daze as Lister fed his coins into the penny machine and walked away with a credit receipt for the princely sum of £2.74. He’d followed him through the streets back up to their tiny little castle as if in a dream, nodding along to Lister’s ever more grandiose plans for his fortune, his thoughts elsewhere.

When they got back home, he shucked off his shoes and coat and went straight upstairs to hide, his thoughts racing at a million miles an hour, so much so that he could barely breathe.

Why did he put up with Lister when he could barely tolerate anyone else? Why did he let him ignore the rules, let him cook them dinner, let him choose what they watched? Why did he find that he actually enjoyed spending time with him, looked forward to when he was home, made him tea and shared his nice biscuits?

There was only one thing that made sense.

The only thing was, that had got to be the most ridiculous notion, the most outlandish thing he’d ever heard.

Arnold Judas Rimmer, be… Infatuated… With David Lister? A man who oozed curry sauce from his pores, a man whose socks probably violated the Geneva convention, a man who had less sense of decorum than a completely blitzed stag do party who also happened to be a 27 piece bagpipe orchestra?

Impossible.

There was only one thing for it.

He’d sketch.

Since he was little, he’d kept a sketchbook. He liked art. While he could definitely be bad at art, he knew that people liked bad art, and put it in important places like the Tate Modern with big long price tags, so even if he was bad at art, that might still make him good at art. Because it was impossible to be truly bad, he liked it and stuck with it, and accidentally became sort of good along the way. Sketching became an outlet, a way of processing things around him and in his head.

Sure, that didn’t stop his family for telling him his art was an affront to the eyeballs on the regular, stealing and hiding and trashing his sketchbook and his talent at every available opportunity (even his mother was known to ‘accidentally’ spill rosé on his doodles), which instilled a deep and long-lasting shame around the endeavour. He’d hid every sketchbook he’d ever owned, even after moving out, and only sketched in places he was sure nobody could see, like his room, or under the pier, or in the corners of cafes in parts of town where he didn’t know anyone.

That’d been scuppered when he found himself befriended by the Hollies. After a couple of visits to scout out the place and merely read (or pretend to read - coincidentally, a lot of his books contained a lot of illustrative photographs he could lose himself in instead of paying any attention to the words), he decided it was the kind of place he would safely be ignored, and started sketching.

He’d been wrong. Having a sketchbook made him Interesting, and that meant he was a target. A target for friendship, or at least a good natter.

“Ooh, you’re quite good, aren’t you?” Holly had cooed one day while setting down his scone with jam and cream and extra cream, and a mug of hot chocolate.

Rimmer had nearly knocked over the table in his haste to snap the sketchbook shut and instead merely upset his cocoa, spilling sticky dribbles of warm brown milk onto the table. His sketches were safe in his white-knuckled grip, clutched to his chest, but the book of vintage aeroplanes he’d been sketching from was not so lucky.

“You-!” He hissed, tucking the sketchbook tightly under one arm as he sprang up to grab the reference book from the puddle and searched frantically for a napkin.

Holly, babbling a mess of ‘oh dear!’s and ‘I’m so sorry!’, set down the empty tray on the next table and grabbed a fistful of napkins from the dispenser there, dabbing at the book as he waved it in the air in a futile attempt to dry it.

“This is a library book!” He squawked, waving it higher, “They’ll fine me!”

Holly stopped in her attempts to napkin the damp pages and set her hands at her hips, thoughtfully looking down at his table. “Maybe if we put cream on it, the white will cancel out and it’ll look alright?”

“That is by far the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard. And I’ve listened to modern pop music.”

Despite this rocky first encounter, it got them talking. Holly, guiltily, would slip him extra-thick slices of cake, and Rimmer, realising he might have someone who would actually be nice to him, would occasionally let her steal glances of his sketches. When she only ever said nice things, he shyly started actively showing them to her, and even drew a couple of her requests.

Naturally, it was Holly who first pointed out the dreadlocked man that kept showing up, delicately pencilled among the telegraph poles and vintage cars.

“You got a boyfriend, Arn?” She’d enquired with her usual lack of subtlety and timing, which caused him to startle so much that he’d inhaled the pea currently balanced on his fork Mr. Holly had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.

When he was just about recovered, he managed to splutter back, “Of course I don’t have a boyfriend, you blithering harpy. Why on Earth would you think that?”

Holly, the insult rolling off her like water off a duck’s back, merely pointed to the portraits and said, “Who’s that then?”

“That’s… That’s Lister! He’s my housemate!” 

“Oh. Cute though, isn’t he?”

“He’s Lister! He’s the furthest thing from cute! A dribbling mole rat hopped up on steroids would have more appeal, and probably a better sense of hygiene.” He’d indignantly snapped the sketchbook shut on the various sketches of his housemate in his short-shorts lounging on the couch and pointedly turned to the window, but he couldn’t hide the blush slowly creeping up his cheeks.

Holly had given him a long, knowing look, but hadn’t said any more.


End file.
